Integrating Email with Team Chat

Most team chat services have some type of email support. Pretty much all provide one-way notifications for missed messages, others go a step further and let you reply to them —with attachments, even [Fleep, Glip, Kato]— but none take it all the way back to days of Outlook and BlackBerry, circa 2004.

Back then, people sent hundreds of short, chat-like emails per day to just a handful of recipients—usually very close colleagues. BlackBerry was the way to keep the conversation going when on the go.

Who am I fooling? Many people—the Alaska-sized area under the adoption bell curve representing the tried-and-true crowd—still use email this way in 2015.

And that’s OK!

Because Sameroom Email Adapter

The good news is you can spare them the pain of dealing with whatever you kids are using these days and create a real-time integration between your chatrooms and their inbox.

To do this, create a Sameroom Portal and email the Portal URL to all your favorite late adopters. When they go through the connection flow, they’ll see an option to connect via email:

After a very straightforward setup, every chat message will result in an email, with the subject matching the name of the Portal source room (this is a adjustable), which means most modern email clients will thread the conversation intelligently:

Replying will post a message to all the connected chatrooms—with a slight delay (5-10 seconds).

Other Uses

I suspect there are other uses for this functionality. For example, you can link a very important chatroom with your email, to make triple-sure you don’t miss anything important.

Oh, and by they way: you can also mark things unread in email, not to mention forwarding, something not possible in many a chat product (yet).

If you find an interesting use case for the email adapter, We’d love to hear about it.

Comments

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